Open the yellow pages to the gardeners section and you’ll find a multitude of advertisers offering a variety of services: pruning, tree services, lawn care, torture by leaf blower and so on. But very few, if any, of the listings offer “vegetable gardening” services.

MyFarm, a new company based in San Francisco, wants to help fill that gap for people who want to grow fruits or vegetables in their yard but are too busy with work, kids, or travel. For a weekly fee, MyFarm will handle the planting, maintenance, and harvesting of a vegetable garden in the client’s yard, with the client receiving everything that is harvested. If the yard doesn’t have an area for vegetable planting, they’ll install raised beds for a fee. Customers with large gardens can opt to pay some of the weekly fee in the form of vegetables. Eventually, the excess produce from the urban gardens will be pooled to create a Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) program.

Tara Duggan, in the San Francisco Chronicle explained some of the goals of the company and how the concept is being tried or considered in other places:

Founder Trevor Paque, 29, envisions what he calls a decentralized urban farm – a network of backyard organic vegetable gardens that will free urbanites from their reliance on food trucked in from the country. Clients who live in the sunny Mission District will grow tomatoes for denizens of the foggy Richmond, where broccoli and other cool-weather vegetables will thrive in customers’ backyards. And bicycles, rather than gas-guzzling trucks, will be the main method of transport.